1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer-supported collaboration and more specifically to event-based collaboration.
2. Description of the Related Art
Collaborative software, also known as groupware, is generally a custom application that integrates work on a single project by several concurrent users on separate computer systems. The various participants may be in different rooms, or different cities. Traditionally, the most common way of collaborating on computer desktops is by sending all the pixels and all the Windows/XWindows events to all participants. For example, VNC, NetMeeting, WebEx all grab control over participant's desktops and send information to be displayed on their desktops. This is a form of white board sharing where graphic information in the form of pixels are transferred from one computer to another for display as graphic images. These traditional approaches require significant network traffic and may involve network latency issues which may result in poor user experience due to dropped or missed frames of information.
Another traditional collaboration approach involves sending documents for use with custom collaboration applications during a collaborative session to each participant. Documents may be sent in advance of a session or on demand. Thus, the participants already have any documents to be discussed. During a collaborative session, a collaboration aware application sends commands and/or instructions to another copy of the application executing on a participant's desktop. On receiving the instructions, the application acts accordingly and syncs up with the copy of the application executing on the presenter's desktop. However, such an approach only works with custom applications that are specifically collaboration aware.